When lonely teenager Harris Resnick gets into a car with a strange man, his life changes completely. It’s the late 1970s,
 a dawning age of sexual awareness. That strange man is a porn director, and what he sees in this young man’s ordinary suburban sexuality is the next big thing. Harris is excited by the adventure; it might give him the same kind of power and importance as his grandmother, the family matriarch and well-known film star Eva Loesch. And so begins the story of a Los Angeles family of entertainers and the lengths they will go to find meaning and purpose in the middle of a century that promised both but betrayed those promises to almost everyone. Funny, raunchy and shocking, A Phantasmagorical Machine is a journey through a lost Los Angeles, a city of secrets, truths, cruelty and unexpected hope.

Los Angeles also is a city of machines — power plants, wind turbines, electric lines, unseen forces in the entertainment industry — Harris Resnick himself is referred to as a 'little machine'. To create a cover representative of this concept, our cover cooks took a wind turbine from the late 1970s, commonly seen in the Deserts of California, as the sole element and seasoned it with a whimsical yet mysterious feel. The title, split as the typographic blades of the wind turbine, conveys the recurring book's theme of circularity: seemingly unrelated characters are drawn together and connected through their desperation. The title itslef could also be read as either 'phantasmagorical' or 'phantasmachine'.